We all think that multi-tasking is great. You can get things done much quicker. Such as working with 50 browser tabs open while writing to your boss as you’re driving to work. If this sounds like you, well, you’re wasting your time.
You might think you’re being some kind of productivity ninja, but scientific research has time and again argued and proven that humans aren’t schematized to multi-task. The worst-case scenario is that our modern society has disgracefully overstated the advantages of multi-tasking as a time-saving technique. In multitasking, we’re actually switching our attention back and forth between the two tasks—and ironically, we perform worse at both.
To understand the impact of multitasking on the human’s brain and its productivity, countless experiments have been conducted and, most of them show that heavy multitaskers were less mentally organized as they struggle at switching from one task to another, and they experience a troublesome time differentiating relevant from irrelevant details. According to neuropsychologist Cynthia Kubu, Ph.D. – Humans are monotaskers, meaning that human brain brains can only focus on one task at a certain time.
Rachel Gauthier, practice leader of healthcare software and services for The Tolan Group says that the benefit or negative impact that multitasking has on productivity is subjective and dependent on the task at hand.
So, what does multitasking does to us? Let’s review a few key issues:
Kills Productivity:
According to a study on multitasking’s effect on productivity found that just 2.5% of people can multitask effectively while it reduces our productivity up to 40% at times.
A Distractor:
People who focus on one task at a time are more attentive than the Multitaskers who essentially have trouble tuning out distractions. Moreover, doing several things at once can actually weaken cognitive ability.
Brain Drainer:
Our brain multitasks by executing functions that control, manage and determine how, when, and in what order certain tasks are needed to be done. By infiltrating yourself with too much information you’re effectively detracting your brain of vital tasks, as Frantzen says:
“The brain is designed for both activity and relaxation, “The brain is made to go into a less active state, which we might think is wasteful; but probably memory consolidation, and transferring information into memory takes place in this state”.
Multitasking offers the perfect solution: get more of your work done in a limited amount of time. Time is like a pizza isn’t it, after all? You can slice it up into as many pieces as you want and still have a whole pizza.
Except that a pizza sliced into lots of tiny pieces is a mushy mess. It isn’t much of a pizza at all.
Author: Sharmin Rahman
Editor: Anik
Photo: Anna
Reference:
1) Rosen, Christine. “The Myth of Multitasking.” The New Atlantis, no. 20, 2008, pp. 105–110., www.jstor.org/stable/43152412. Accessed 27 July 2021.
2) Buser, T., Peter, N. Multitasking. Exp Econ 15, 641–655 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-012-9318-8
3) L. Mark Carrier, Nancy A. Cheever, Larry D. Rosen, Sandra Benitez, Jennifer Chang, Multitasking across generations: Multitasking choices and difficulty ratings in three generations of Americans, Computers in Human Behavior,
4) https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/multitasking
5) https://www.mheducation.com/highered/insights-ideas/multitasking-helpful-or-harmful.html
6) https://www.health.com/condition/adhd/12-reasons-to-stop-multitasking-now
